


Ask Me About My Relationship With My Ex

by one_of_those_crushing_scenes



Series: 616 Canon-Compliant One-Shots [2]
Category: Hawkeye (Comics), Mockingbird (Comic)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Civil War II (Marvel), Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Mentioned Lincoln Slade, Missing Scene, One Shot, Past Clint Barton/Bobbi Morse, Pizza, Retcon What Retcon, Takes place after Mockingbird #8, Warning: Discussion of Rape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-15
Updated: 2017-11-15
Packaged: 2019-02-02 22:34:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12735657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/one_of_those_crushing_scenes/pseuds/one_of_those_crushing_scenes
Summary: “Wait,” Clint says, holding out his hand to prevent her entrance. “The pizza I’ll take, but are you here to yell at me, because if so, maybe just send a letter or something.”She lets out an annoyed huff. “I’m here because I needed a friend, actually. Not everything is about you and your murder trial.”





	Ask Me About My Relationship With My Ex

_you home? free to hang out?_

Clint reads the message twice and drops the phone back onto the coffee table, almost laughing in disbelief. Of course he's home—it’s ten at night and everyone hates him—where else would he be?

He's surprised that Bobbi's texting him, actually. They haven't spent much time together lately, aside from that one incident when she rescued him from that underwater research station, not since after that whole thing with the Tracksuit Mafia that was making trouble for the people in his building. She didn't come to court at all during the trial, which was fine, not that he would expect her to, it's just that… nobody was rooting for him there, not even him. It would have been nice.

He’d gotten used to having someone be there for him. But Bobbi’s been distant for a while now, which is her right, of course, and now Kate’s avoiding him, too, ever since he publicly sullied their shared name, which is _her_ right, and look at him, feeling bad for himself because none of his friends want to play with him anymore now that he killed one of them in cold blood.

He picks his phone back up and answers, _yeah_ , leaving the sarcasm and the self-pity to the side.

It doesn’t take ten seconds for her response to come through:

_buzz me in. i’ve got pizza_

Pizza. That's worth getting up for.

He buzzes her in and waits by the door for her to arrive so that he doesn’t have to go through the effort of getting up again. Lucky sits by his feet, and at some point he stands and barks, so Clint assumes he's hearing her footsteps. He opens the door just as she’s raising her hand to knock.

She looks good. Her hair is up in a high ponytail and she’s wearing a blue tank top with thick straps that go around her back like a sports bra, showing off the muscles of her shoulders. She’s also carrying not one, but _two_ boxes of pizza, and he thinks he might want to marry her all over again just for that.

“Hey, Barton,” she says. “Hi, Lucky.” She hands the pizza over to Clint and bends down to scratch behind Lucky’s ears, then tries to follow the dog into the living room.

“Wait,” Clint says, holding out his hand to prevent her entrance. “The pizza I’ll take, but are you here to yell at me, because if so, maybe just send a letter or something.”

She lets out an annoyed huff. “I’m here because I needed a friend, actually. Not everything is about you and your murder trial. Congrats on getting off, by the way.”

“Do you mean that?”

She moves in close to him and pokes him in the chest, giving him a _cut-the-crap_ look. “Pay attention, because I’m only going to say this one time. You wouldn’t have done it if you didn’t think it was the right thing to do. Now we’re done talking about it.”

“Oh.” He swallows around a lump in his throat and lets her pass. She takes the boxes back from him, easy as you please, and plops them down on the coffee table. The first thing she does after that is take a paper plate from the bag she’s holding, pull out a slice of pizza from the top box, and set it down on the floor for Lucky, who gives a few happy barks and digs in.

“Want a beer?” Clint asks, and when she answers in the affirmative, he goes to the kitchen to bring them out. He’s had this six-pack forever—he’d forgotten that the drinking age is twenty-one when he bought it, and he'd refused to contribute to the corruption of a minor by giving Kate alcohol, even though she risks her life by fighting by his side regularly (he doesn’t need anything else on his conscience), and he doesn’t drink alone, and then Kate's birthday had come and gone and by then, he'd totally forgotten about the beer. So these cans have been gathering dust, so to speak, for a very long time.

When he gets back with the beer, she’s staked out a corner of the couch for herself and is already on her second slice. He opens a can before handing it to her, and settles in on the other side of the couch, positioning himself carefully so that they don’t touch. It’s better that way.

He wonders what she meant when she said she needed a friend.

“You’ve got a good dog,” Bobbi says.

Clint glances over at Lucky, who’s happy as a clam over there with his pizza. “Yep.”

“I got a dog, too. Well, kind of. There’s this guy…the dog’s his, technically.”

Interesting. He didn’t know about a guy.

“But I named him. Ka-Zar.”

He laughs, caught by surprise. “Nice.”

“I thought so.”

He takes a slice for himself, and for a few minutes, they eat without talking.

“Do they have pizza in jail?” she asks.

“ _Bobbi_.” He's guessing she didn't come all the way out to Brooklyn to ask him about the food in jail. 

“Yeah, yeah, okay.” She seems nervous, rubbing her palms together and looking anywhere but him. “So, uh, while you were on trial, I went on this cruise.”

Not what he expected her to say. “Way to rub it in my—wait.” He tilts his head at her. “The Hawkeye cruise?”

“Yeah. I was invited by someone anonymous who said that they had some sort of top-secret—whatever, it’s not important.”

“Okay.”

She continues, “It was very stressful for a cruise. Some guy in a horse mask got murdered, and, as you’ve probably guessed, the whole thing was a setup. Futzing Phantom Rider again. He showed up, wanted to take me away with him.”

Just the name gets his hackles up; the guy isn’t even here and he wants to punch him into next week. Bobbi can take care of herself, but it makes him furious that she even has to. After all the Phantom Rider has done to her, he doesn’t even have the decency to leave her alone.

“You beat his ass?” Clint asks.

She flinches, which is weird, and shakes her head. “I got him to leave on his own. I told him… I told him that it was consensual between me and him. That I went with him willingly, but that I wasn't interested in him anymore.”

“What?” He’s shocked. “Why would...?”

“He really believes it, Clint.” She meets his gaze, and what he sees in her eyes terrifies him, the vulnerability that she rarely shows to anyone, not even him while they were together. He wonders if it’s easier for her to be vulnerable around him now that they’re not together, because she doesn’t feel like she needs to spare him the load. She continues, “That’s what scares me, his persistence. The more I’ve denied it, the more he insists. He’s always refused to believe that I was only ever with him because he drugged me. So… I told him what he wanted to hear.”

“And that worked?” 

“Yeah. After I told him that, he just walked away.”

“Wow.” He shakes his head. “I'm sorry you had to do that.”

“Yeah, it was pretty gross.” She’s silent for a bit, like she’s trying to figure out how to word what she wants to say. “I can beat him, I’ve beaten him a thousand times, but he always comes back, and the only way to defeat him for good—I _hope_ —is to play into his misogynist bullshit paradigm where women are just vessels for men’s desires, so the fact that he, as the protagonist of his own story, wanted me, must mean that I wanted him back, because I was just a supporting player. So now I have to turn _myself_ into the bad guy just to justify his persecution complex, making me the heartless ex he’s better off without, instead of someone who never wanted him near me in the first place.” She finishes her speech with a deep inhale, and he's speechless. “Anyway, men suck.”

Clint sighs. “Yeah, we do.”

“I prefer dogs.”

“I don't blame you. Want some more pizza?”

“Yes, please.”


End file.
